“Those anonymous letters I got? What do you know——”
“I wrote them,” said Anice Lanier.
CHAPTER X
ANICE INTERVENES
“You wrote them? You wrote them?” muttered Standish, over and over, stupid, dazed, refusing to believe, to understand.
“Yes,” she said, “I wrote them. And I wrote one to Mr. Ansel. He was wiser than you. He tried to profit by what I——”
“And I—I thought it might be Gerald Conover.”
“Gerald? He never knew any of the more secret details of the campaign. His father couldn’t trust him.”
“And he did trust you.”
Clive had not meant to say it. He was sorry before the words had passed his lips. Yet it was the first lucid thought that came to him as his mind cleared from the first shock of Anice’s revelation. He knew how fully Conover believed in this pretty secretary of his; how wholly the Railroader had, in her case, departed from his life rule of universal suspicion. That she should thus, coldbloodedly, calculatingly, have betrayed the trust of even such an employer as Caleb was monstrous. He could not reconcile it with anything in his own long knowledge of her. The revelation turned him sick.
“You despise me, don’t you?” she asked. There was no shame, no faltering in her clear young voice.